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Wednesday, February 1, 2017

SUCCESS SPECIAL ............Why Successful People Take 10 Years to 'Succeed Overnight'

Why Successful
People Take 10 Years to 'Succeed Overnight'

There's a reason why this
10-years-to-overnight-success pattern shows up over and over. And it's not just
about working hard.

This is a guest post from Ramit Sethi, the New York Times best-selling author of I
Will Teach You to Be Rich. Fortune magazine recently called
him the "new finance guru on the block." He writes for more than one
million readers each month on business, careers, negotiation, and psychology.

There's a reason this
10-years-to-overnight-success pattern shows up over and over. And it's not just
about working hard over a long period of time.

I know from personal experience. In 2004, I
started a personal-finance blog while I was a college student. Today, that "hobby"
is a multimillion-dollar business. For the first three years, we made no money
(literally). In 2014, 10 years later, we had our first $5 million week.

I've also studied the backstories of hundreds
of successful entrepreneurs before they became known to the world.

Here's the deeper strategy used by successful
people to level up that almost no one talks about.

The underappreciated power of sequence

We all have these big goals to attain a rich
and meaningful life.

The challenge
is that we start our careers with few resources. We have little to no money
saved up. We don't know a lot about how the business world really works.
We don't have a large professional network.

So the question is, how do we close this gap
over time? What's the best strategy?

Conventional experts tell you, "To go
big, you need to start big." They tell you a thousand and one things you
"need" to do all at once, like SEO, picking the right résumé font,
building a business Facebook page, starting a podcast, and on and on.

Forget about all of that.

The strategy that works over and over for
successful people is the Domino Strategy.

The Domino Strategy is simple.

First, start
so small that you can easily knock over the first domino. For example, the
first step in starting a business is brainstorming the business idea. The first
step to anything should be deceptively simple.

Second, put
the dominoes in just the right sequence so that each small step makes the next,
bigger step possible. The second step in starting a business is to find one
paying customer to test if the idea has potential. Doing this can be as simple
as sending an email. Once you have the first customer, next plan how to get
five, etc. If you start small and level up in the right order, you'll never
think to yourself, "I don't have time or money to do this."

The real key here is sequence. Creating a
plan to get 10,000 customers is great, but your initial step should be to get
one customer, not 10,000. Similarly, creating a podcast might be the right
thing to do. But if you try to do it at the wrong time, then it's basically the
same thing as taking the wrong step. The dominoes won't fall, and you'll fail
to reach your goal. Most people miss this.

Gary Keller,
the founder of one of the largest real estate franchises in the world, Keller
Williams, drives this point home in his book, The One Thing:

"When you see someone who has a lot of
knowledge, they learned it over time.
When you see someone who has a lot of skills, they developed them over time.
When you see someone who has done a lot, they accomplished it over time.
When you see someone who has a lot of money, they earned it over time."

How the Domino Strategy helped Elon Musk
become Elon Musk

The Domino Strategy shows how a tiny amount
of energy can be converted into something 1,000 times or even a billion times
larger.

With just 13
dominoes, this YouTuber created a two billion times
amplification in energy. The first domino is just 5mm high. The largest domino
weighs 100 pounds and is more than a meter tall. With 16 more dominoes,
there would be enough force to knock over the Empire State Building.

The power of dominoes explains how a
15-year-old could leave South Africa with no money and no connections and end
up becoming the Elon Musk we know today.

Most people have only heard of Musk in the
past few years. To many, he seems like an overnight success. This is
hilarious--we look at others and compare our day one with their day 500. I do
it; you do it; we all do it.

When you learn
his story, though, you see how Musk has been focused on the same vision since
he was a teenager, and he's been consciously leveling up for decades.

Throughout his teenage years, he read two
books per day, according to his brother, Kimbal Musk. More than a decade before
he started Tesla, Musk was studying physics at the University of Pennsylvania
and then battery technology at Stanford, both key fields for learning how to
build an electric car.

He shows his early obsession with electric
cars in a recent interview. He tells the story of what was on his mind during a
first date when he was in college more than 20 years ago.

Musk is not alone in using the Domino
Strategy. Many of the world's top entrepreneurs are masters of it. Here are a
few examples:

Paul Graham, founder of Y
Combinator, the largest accelerator in the world:
"Empirically, the way to do really big things seems to be to start with
deceptively small things.... Want to make the universal website? Start by
building a site for Harvard undergrads to stalk one another." --Source

Verne Harnish, co-founder
of Entrepreneurs' Organization, the largest association of top entrepreneurs
in the world:
"Your job is to find that front domino, that number one thing that if
you could accomplish, [that] will knock over the other 98 and get more done
than the other 98 combined." --Source

Over the past 12 years, I've studied the
psychology of what stops people from becoming world-class performers.

One of the biggest obstacles is invisible
scripts. These are the assumptions so deeply embedded in our psyches that we
don't even realize they guide our behavior.

What's the biggest invisible script?

All or nothing, the idea that you need to go
all-in or you should just not do anything at all. Here are a few examples:

·Money: "I don't want to have to
track every penny of my spending for the rest of my life!" (You don't, but
that invisible script allows you to not track anything at all.)

·Health: "I don't want to have to
watch every single thing I eat forever. I like having a treat now and
then!" (So you just keep doing exactly what you've been doing.)

·Relationship: "So you want me to
communicate better. You're saying I have to tell you every single thing I'm
thinking. That's just not how I'm built!" (Nobody wants to hear every
thought you have. They do want you to communicate better.)

·Business: "I don't have enough time
or money to start a business!" (Starting a business requires one thing, a
customer. You can get a customer in a few hours, for free.)

Let's unpack this a little bit more. If you
believe the "all or nothing" invisible script, you probably respond
in one of two ways.

Either you go looking for a magic
bullet--like a fad diet or a get-rich-quick scheme--that will knock over
the final domino, but skip the preceding, critical dominoes; or you just
throw a lot of spaghetti on the wall and hope something sticks.

Just like a lottery ticket, the magic bullet
and spaghetti-on-the-wall strategies indulge our need for fantasy and immediate
gratification. You think to yourself, "If just one of these hits, I've
made it."

But, just like a lottery ticket, they don't
actually make sense for accomplishing big goals. They are forms of escape.

Escape is for entertainment, not success.

Escaping the treadmill of disappointment

What makes the magic bullet and
spaghetti-on-the-wall strategies so ineffective? You keep on losing momentum
and having to start over.

I call this the treadmill of disappointment.

Here's what happens:

First, you work really hard for a long time,
but you're not seeing the progress you expected owing to overnight-success
stories. You're not sure if things will work out if you keep going
forward.

So, you assume that what you're doing is not
working, and you start over. But once you start over, you have to start from
close to scratch.

What you didn't factor in is that dominoes
are exponential. Just as you were about to see real progress, you gave up.

To escape the treadmill of disappointment,
you need to start using the Domino Strategy and have the patience to stick with
it in the beginning.

All you have to do to get started with the
Domino Strategy is take Gary Keller's advice and ask yourself one key question
over and over:

What's the One
Thing I can do such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or
unnecessary?